I was reading an ESPN insider article the other day and it laid the Ducks troubles on the fact that we don't posses the puck. They based this on shot based metrics that the writer didn't really go into, but apparently we don't do well in these categories. This isn't surprising considering on frequently we get out shot. Last years success the writer attributed to being on the good side of Lady Luck and now we are seeing things come back to normal. This led the writer into what I believe to be the premise of the article and something we around here have been saying for 2 years. Ready for it?.... The Ducks lack Depth. These people get paid to write these things, its amazing... but I digress. It did, however, get me thinking about our depth scoring and what the numbers actually looked like. So I sat down and crunched a few numbers and found them to be encouraging. As a disclaimer going into these calculations I considered depth scoring any goals scored by players not typically in our top 6 in addition of Lubo and Fowler. To make things easier for myself I just subtracted their goal totals from the team total instead of trying to figure out all the goals each player that has been rotated into our bottom 6 or an occasion step in on the top two lines. Here are the results for the first 41 games:

In the 2010-11 season the Ducks scored a total of 235 goals. Our top 2 lines with Lubo and Fowler accounted for 193 of those goals, leaving 42 goals by depth players. This is approximately 18% of our production last year.

Currently we have 103 goals and 75 of those come from the same 8 players with the exception that Hagman replaced Blake. This has our depth scoring for 27% of our teams production. Now this can be easily dismissed when you consider that the drop in top line scoring would increase the depth scoring %, which it has. Let us go a little further and actually look at goals produced. Currently our depth has produced 28 goals. For simplicities sake lets say we continue at this exact rate so by the end of the season we would have 56 goals produced by depth players. This is a 33% increase in production from last year. Is it enough? Probably not but it is nice to see it going in the right direction.

On the flip side we have our top 8 production obviously down from last year. The actual drop is 22% currently if we assume the continued pace for the rest of the season. The teams overall production would also go down to 206 goals for a decrease of approximately 12%

Another Stat that I looked at was our 5on5 scoring. last year we scored 140 goals 5on5 for approximately 60% of our production. For comparisons sake, Boston had 177 5on5 goals out of a total of 244 for 72% production. Boston was number 1, we were number 25, only better than Montreal, Minnesota, Edmonton, Ottawa, and New Jersey for 5on5 goals for. Lets go one step further by looking at those 5 teams production %s. Respectively they are: 64%, 64%, 66%, 69%, 69%. Of these teams, only Montreal made the playoffs last year. They like us benefited from a good power play as they were ranked 7th in the league. we were ranked 3rd. I'm pretty sure that put as last in the league in 5on5 scoring. Which brings us to this year. 73 of our 103 goals have come 5on5 for about 71% which is nice. But again actual gain is probably better served in comparing actual goals which would put us on pace for 146 or an increase of about 4%. Of course on the other side of this we have let in 95 of 132 goals for about 72% goals against coming on 5on5 where last year it was about 67%. Its hard to say weather this is from our depth playing poorer on D or our D and Goal tending just being poorer.

As for BB things are a bit more cloudy. Under BB we have 2.94 goals per game, under Carlyle we had 2.21 goals per game. On the other hand BB has a 3.41 goals against per game while Carlyle 3.08 goals against per game.

All in all I think there were some interesting numbers and some encouraging ones in there too. Feel free to debate relevancy or give your opinions.